28 in this, childish in his penchant for playing little jokes on the boss. In his m ural In San Francisco, he painted a figure of a workman from whose pocket a tag hung down. On this he painted the red star of the Communist party. When he was asked to remove it, he did, chuckling. Similarly, In the R.C.A. mural, he painted the ham- mer and sickle of Soviet Russia on a matchbox lying on a bridge table. His injection of Lenin's likeness was this kind of prank. N 0- body at Radio City recognized the fig- ure shown on the preliminary sketch as Lenin, and all were astonished when it turned out to be he. Rivera is astonish- ingly casual in his selection of human models. At Rocke- feller Center, it was his habit to shou t to passing workmen to come up on the scaffold and sit for him. The fresco's central figure, a young engIneer re- presenting Man at the crossroads of ci- vilization, was based on a night watch- man who happened to be around. The original of the model girl student in the students' group was an obliging young woman who was looking on when Diego came to that part of the fresco. "Actually I was kicked out of Hunter for flunking five subjects," she gig- glingly told friends later. The red- haired girl in the bridge section is a likeness of a red-headed girl seized as she came out of Roxy's one after- noon. F or all his violent propaganda, Ri- vera is gentle, polite, and unassum- ing. He loves meeting people, and when he is working his assistants have to keep him from clambering down the ladder too often to talk to onlookers. He has a shy, twisted smile, and even when advancing his poli- tical opinions does so hesitantly. Next to a revolution or an art controversy, " ;t: .' .. ...:.... . .' .-: 1: :.: ,+r j ' ; , { : , ^;z , ':' "" " , :,: /:i:; ':" it: :" >' : -y ...... 'JdEF,,; ^ M"'<, " ((1If 7 ilbert) the n en are here fron1 the finance con pany to take the car." nothing puts him in better humor than the company of a beautiful woman. On such occasions, he is full of the most urbane and extravagant compli- ments. To his present wife, a slim, dark-haired Mexican beauty who is the third Mrs. Rivera, he is the last word in affectionate gallantry. She watches him work and sees to it that he gets fed every few hours. He him- self has no sense of time, is continual- ly missing trains, and often dresses in taxis on the way to some appointment. This summer, he expects to go to Cape Cod for a few weeks before returning to Mexico City, where he is doing a fresco of the history of Mexico for the National Palace. He has recently built a brightly colored modernistic house there. At parties, Rivera likes to sing Italian and French revolutionary songs and . . do Mexican dances around a bottle. Thanks to a strict diet, he has recently lost a hundred and twen ty-fi ve pounds, but even in the old days, when he weighed three hundred and twenty- fi ve, he was much too agile ever to step on the bottle. These playful moods are occasionally varied by an unac- countable fit of the sulks. He was in- clined to be playful rather than sulky on the fatal night at Rockefeller Cen- ter when Mr. Hugh Robertson of Todd, Robertson & Todd, Ranked by a squad of uniformed guards, advanced with a check for fourteen thousand dol- lars and the information that inasmuch as he refused to delete the figure of Lenin, his services would no longer be required. Rivera's first observation was: "How do you know it's Lenin? It doesn't say so, does it?" -GEOFFREY T. HELLMAN